Forum:Merge policy/guideline discussion
It's been suggested that the discussion on buildings articles be a separate page, so here we are. I don't think the appearance of a cityscape or other general image of a city is enough to get every building and street seen an article. We have decided in the past that the appearance of a map of the Earth in canon was not enough to get every location on the Earth an article. There is a difference between the Golden Gate Bridge (prominent in shots of San Fran, and mentioned a couple times, I think), the Eiffel Tower (again, prominent and representative of the city) than 101 California Street or One Maritime Plaza or 50 Fremont Center, which were never the focus of establishing shots of the city. I don't know what the exact standard should be in this matter, but that should have something to do with it. Lastly, I think putting the architectural style of these barely seen buildings in the article is a stretch, unless it was mentioned. 31dot (talk) 12:01, October 8, 2013 (UTC) :I have been going through the references from the fourth movie. I have been adding delete tags on most buildings and other places that weren't named. The ones that I think have importance are the Transamerica Pyramid, the Coit Tower, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge. These are iconic to the Bay Area. I am looking at the other references.Throwback (talk) 12:36, October 8, 2013 (UTC) ::I agree with 31dot here as well. However, if articles are now being suggested for deletion anyway, it might be best to wait for that process to go through before continuing this discussion. --Cid Highwind (talk) 12:54, October 8, 2013 (UTC) :::I disagree that the pages should all be tagged with deletes now that the discussion here has begun. The discussion should carry through before the deletion option is made. -- sulfur (talk) 13:01, October 8, 2013 (UTC) :I went through the references for the fourth movie. I have put a high number up for deletion. Some of them I made myself. I included references from a bag that someone saw at the Cetacean Institute that had illustrations of California landmarks. I have seen the film on bluray and I couldn't tell you what was on that bag. Aside from Market Street and Embarcadero, I have thrown the other streets to the "refuse pile". What else have I thrown into the refuse pile? Cars, for example. The rationale, this is stuff that isn't identified in the canon or in the script. It's stuff that people know from doing research or being able to identify immediately what it is.Throwback (talk) 13:08, October 8, 2013 (UTC) :::To continue my thought, rather than adding it onto every single delete article that was just created, it is not original research to identify something seen on screen. If these were buildings on "other planets", we'd be doing our best to identify them if possible. Since a couple of films have focused on San Francisco on Earth, why should those be any different? Further thought... the library computer references in logically fall into the same line of thought (if you want to take it to its conclusion). Are we going to go through this same discussion for all of those? If it weren't for MA:POINT, I'd go add "delete page" templates to each of those items. -- sulfur (talk) 14:03, October 8, 2013 (UTC) :I can't confirm what I have seen for I don't have screen capture technology. And, frankly, I am testing the waters. There has been a subtle change in policy, and I am throwing the widest net possible to see what is permissible and what is not permissible. References in dialog are easy to write for. Do I create two articles, one for whale hunters and one for whaling? I find that creating one article for whaling actually answers the question, what is a whale hunter? When it comes to visual references, it seems that is when things begin to fall apart. Do I include only things for whose name I can see? Or, do I include what, through research, can be identified with certainity? Someone wrote a series of articles about places that were known by symbology on a bag that an elderly woman carried in the Cetacean Institute. As I have been unable to identify these same things for the bag is barely seen, I have to wonder how accurately his articles are. As there are no visual media accompanying the articles, I can only guess at what he is seeing. And, what is the test for visual acuteness? I have a 42 inch televison, so I might be seeing things that someone with a smaller tv might not see.Throwback (talk) 14:20, October 8, 2013 (UTC) ::(edit conflict, reply mostly to sulfur) Just to make that explicit: these articles have first been discussed in the lengthy Forum:Whale articles discussion as possible other merge candidates. My above comment does not mean that I necessarily want to see all those articles deleted (although some of them should be, in my opinion*) - but now that they have been put up for deletion besides also discussing their possible merging, we should not discuss in both places at once. One way would be to see which articles "survive" the deletion process and then discuss if those should be merged. Another way would be to discuss merging first, and then see if any of the remaining articles end up still being "controversial" and bring those up for deletion again. Discussing in too many places at once just adds to the already existing confusion. -- Cid Highwind (talk) 14:25, October 8, 2013 (UTC) :::And you've hit the crux of my problem. It's already spread across two forums. Now it's also onto about 15-20 deletion pages. If that's not too many places, I really don't know what is. -- sulfur (talk) 14:29, October 8, 2013 (UTC) ::Well, before Throwbacks last comment I was giving him the benefit of the doubt - but after that comment, it seems as if it is a case of disrupting MA to prove a point instead of a genuine attempt to get rid of articles that he himself thinks shouldn't be part of this wiki. After he also, suddenly told us, after 40KB of discussion, that the whale articles should be removed now, I guess I'll sit this one out until someone else settles the question of where and what to discuss in one way or another. For what it's worth, I just think that individual buildings that just were visible in a wide shot, and of which we don't even now a "canonical" address, shouldn't have their own articles. --Cid Highwind (talk) 16:37, October 8, 2013 (UTC) ::::First of, let me say I don't believe these pages should be deleted, but merged at the most. We strive for completeness so imo that's very clear. Secondly, I agree mentioning the architectural style is a big stretch. With such vague references, we should be very careful to mention only what is known. For the vast majority, not even the name is technically known, though I was basing it on our precedents for things like naming famous paintings that were seen but not mentioned. But I can see that's debatable. In any case, the key I think is to strictly limit ourselves to information that can actually be sourced from the episode, and then see if we still have enough information to justify individual articles. If not, or if we decide naming them is not justified, then they should be merged into something. ::::On a sidenote; I was the one who created the bag articles, based on blu-ray (which I borrowed so unfortunatly don't have right now if needed for discussion), and would really like there to be pictures but also don't know how to do that. Also note that while each article says, "seen on a bag", there were actually two people with identical bags, and not each article is sourced on the same bag. Before I've read this page (and thus unfortunate in defiance of the excellent point that the discussion would better be in one place), I've posted on why I've created them here. -- Capricorn (talk) 17:46, October 8, 2013 (UTC) ::::No one has come forward with an idea for folding this all into one place again, so let me give it a try. I think we can safely disregard the deletion discussions (for) now, since only Throwback suggested deletion as opposed to merger, and he seems to no longer stand by his reasons for that. Also arguably the issue of the whales specifically has come as close to a consensus as it's going to get, since 31dot said he could live with the articles as they currently are, and Throwback seems to have abandoned his stance that the whole lot of articles ought to be deleted. That leaves this page. But on the other hand, there's still other classes of articles that fall under this discussion. In the whale discussion, I for example brought up individual books, and even though no one picked up on that that is a genuine concern for me. I think we need to decide if we want to decide these things on a subject-by subject basis, in which case we stay here, or on a general basis, in which case I guess we best either make this about everything, or make yet a new forum page. -- Capricorn (talk) 16:33, October 9, 2013 (UTC) ::For the record, I'm only not supporting some of these deletion suggestions because it has been requested to not make a bigger mess of this (and I think that is a good idea). These articles should not be considered having "survived" a deletion discussion - or else we we will have to discuss all those suggestions now. It doesn't really help this discussion that Throwback alternates between the two extremes of creating and suggesting deletion of all articles repeatedly. Regarding the rest, you are creating horror stories about all kinds of article being up for grabs again. If this is what you want to do, the least you could do is to actually suggest the kind of "objective guideline" you keep requesting. --Cid Highwind (talk) 20:50, October 9, 2013 (UTC) :::::We should at least merge those discussions together (someone let me know if that's cool and I can do it in a manner that should leave them understandable), or we could merge them all here ( I can do that as well). If we're not going to do either of those though, they should be deleted, since we shouldn't keep them open if this is the location they should be discussed, which I agree with, and we can't really close them in the "normal" manner either, since we shouldn't keep a bunch of archived pages that really only tell you to come to this one. - 22:42, October 9, 2013 (UTC) :(edit confict - this is mostly in answer to Cid, but I'm ok with Archduke's proposal) First off, I don't consider those pages to have survived a deletion discussion either, even if I do strongly believe they should not be deleted but at most merged. As far as I'm concerned it's a special case; they were nominated because of a misunderstanding about where we were in the discussion. :Considering the book issue; I don't see it as a horror story, I was merely trying to point out that this for example this article (picture pending) which is part of a series of articles which I've recently put some work in, has exactly as much of little going for being a seperate article as the whale articles. (to summarise: It's one in a list of very short and similar articles, based only on being seen and the name being legible, with information which could easily be merged in the article about the class of things it is (book). I actually intended to create articles on more books when the discussion started, but halted that effort until we got more clarity. So for me it wasn't just a hypothetical, bringing that up. :As for the guidelines you kept asking, I didn't exactly ignore that, I said that unfortunately I didn't know. Not helpfull, I admit, but I was trying, just not getting very far. And I believed that in itself couldn't be taken as an excuse to just merge anything anyone feels has a vibe of insignificance. :But Oh Joy, then came a post in the whale discussion by Archduk3 which I think pretty much gave the answers you wanted, and was clearly rooted in existing policy to boot. Since you didn't respond when I pointed out that I believed that to be the case, I'll try to distill it in a more formal policy-like format. There's also a few refinements of my own. Incidentally I'm not the best person at writing these kinds of things, so please bear with me for this rough draft. :*All these conditions would have to be fullfilled to not be merged: :**Articles would have to have a name referenced from canon. Maybe we could allow the usual types of permitted production sources for naming too, not that I can think of an example where that makes a difference. (this is the case for whales, but not the case for most of these landmarks, so the latter would be merged) :**Articles would have to have to have a minumum size of two sentences. That's inspired by guidelines at Memory Alpha:Contribute what you know or are willing to learn about and our guideline as to what isn't a stub. :**There must at least be some subject-unique information except for the different name. Archduk3 specifically suggested that different) pictures might be counted as unique information too, which I think makes some sense and is a excellent idea, but I guess that bit is debatable. :**In case of the landmarks specifically, it has also been suggested that there ought to be an exception for "iconic" city-establishing buildings like the Transamerica Pyramid no matter what. As to what exactly counts as iconic, I don't know, but I agree that even if I would end up supporting a merge consensus, I'd be uncomfortable extending that to the Transamerica Pyramid. :**Furthermore, there should also be an exception to make sure that for example even if the whales were to be merged in whale, Denebian whale would not be. I'm not sure how to word that exception right now, but it should be doable and from previous posts I bet the proponents of merging can help comming up with guidelines for those two exceptions. :Now, just to move this subject along, I also have another thought that hasn't been brought up yet. We're talking about maybe merging this in a page for SF landmarks, but based on certain shots from and , I'm pretty sure there's a bunch of NYC landmarks waiting to be documented. If there's a few those could be represented on a single page too, so far so good. But if landmarks were to be found in other cities (can't think of any examples though), with this approach we may end up with lots of pages like "Paris landmarks" which have exactly one entry. For that reason, maybe its better to abandon the "San Francisco landmarks" approach in favour of a more general "unnamed landmarks" page. -- Capricorn (talk) 23:05, October 9, 2013 (UTC) ::Just to play devil's advocate for a moment: :::Room 08-0669''' was a room on board the USS Enterprise-D. In 2365, it was inhabited by Lieutenant B.G. Robinson. ( )'' ::That's two sentences of unique information and a canon name, everything necessary to allow creation of an article that must not be merged according to the suggested guidelines - yet I wouldn't want dozens of room articles to pop up where that information should clearly (in my opinion) be part of the Ent-D article. Before you or anyone claims that his is just a theoretical issue which would never happen, please note that we already have the redirect Room 727, which could similarly be turned into a separate article under these conditions. Do you agree that this shouldn't happen and can you suggest something that prevents it, or am I alone in thinking that these articles wouldn't be good? --Cid Highwind (talk) 23:35, October 9, 2013 (UTC) ::::I think rooms within specific article-worthy objects (like the Enterprise) are somehow different from buildings within a specific city. We woudn't have articles for the specific patches of a football too. And on a sidenote, 08-0669 isn't a name, it's an adress or a serial number. I can see a number of other problems with my proposed guidelines though, it's certainly not perfect yet. You asked for something, why don't you try to do something constructive with them instead of picking them apart by playing devil's advocate. (heck, you criticized me for bringing up "horror story" scenarios about books, and now you come up with a devil's advocate scenario about an article called "Room 08-0669". You can't criticize me for seeing flaws in your view, and then shoot down my views because they're not perfect.) -- Capricorn (talk) 00:42, October 10, 2013 (UTC) ::::Oh, and to answer a specific question, I do agree that the articles you describe woudn't be any good. -- Capricorn (talk) 00:53, October 10, 2013 (UTC) The Transamerica Pyramid was mentioned in the script for the first movie. In the script, the writer wrote, :From this vantage, we can SEE all of twenty-third century San Francisco stretched out before us. In the b.g., the familiar forms of the carefully preserved Golden Gate Bridge and Transamerica Pyramid Building serve as our only reminders that this is, indeed, San Francisco. http://www.st-minutiae.com/academy/literature329/tmp.txt I know I have no credibility after what I did here. Yet, I need to raise a point. Sorry. Looking at the visual references from the fourth movie, we have articles about things that weren't named in the canon and needed original research to aid in their identification. This is one film. I am sure an examination of other films and episodes will have the same result. Whatever decision we take here, I think we should note that it will have an impact on all other articles. Are we talking about creating a means test?Throwback (talk) 01:26, October 10, 2013 (UTC) ::::I have to go to sleep, but just a very quick reply to that to one specific point; I'm worried that you might not have the right idea about what constitutes original research. Identifying something in a picture is certainly not. -- Capricorn (talk) 01:44, October 10, 2013 (UTC) Why is is so hard to find anything on this site? The search engine is a joke. I had to do a google search to find what Wikipedia defines "original research" as. I did research to identity these things. I didn't know them by name. It might not be "original research", but it is research.Throwback (talk) 02:09, October 10, 2013 (UTC) ::You know what, forget this discussion. I will just oppose and refuse changing my mind while someone else runs amok and suggests articles for deletion with "no reason" as the deletion rationale. There have been ten new suggestions after my last comment here alone. This either stops and gets sorted out by someone, or I will just happily play along and delete these suggested articles after the minimum time allowed by policy. --Cid Highwind (talk) 08:04, October 10, 2013 (UTC) As someone said above, I was "making a point" initially. I did't have a reason to delete the articles, most of the articles anyway. I just selected the articles most likely to be selected for deleton by a moderator. Other than the items seen on a bag, for which I can not speak for and have not confirmed, a majority of the items weren't named in the canon. I threw in the streets because someone objected to their existence. I wanted to see if this policy was being extended to just the buildings and the whales, or was it expanding into other areas. Confusion began when 31dot didn't object initially to Capricorn writing these articles. I took that action as consent to name other buildings, and Capricorn added some more of his own. When it came to my attention that this act of massively selecting articles for deletion was fogging, not clearing, the issue, I had to take action to defog the situation, so to speak. As I am not a moderator, I don't have the authority to remove the delete tag. So, I chose the next best thing.Throwback (talk) 09:01, October 10, 2013 (UTC) :::::Upon further investigation, all those deletion discussions were invalid on their own, as the rationale was based on an incomplete discussion (namely this one), and edits like these made in violation of MA:POINT are invalid anyway. The history is preserved in the redirect to this page, though anything said there should have been, and I'm going to assume was, said here as well. :::::As long as were talking about not disrupting Memory Alpha to prove a point, Cid, take a look at your last few posts here (and in related discussions) and then check the examples of gaming the system. If the overlap in the two isn't obvious, I'll go though it point by point. If you're ready to get back on board with this discussion though, please feel free to. :::::Throwback, if you're going to tag more pages for deletion, though I '''''strongly advise you not to until there is a consensus here, do not create more pointless deletion discussion pages. If the instructions for deleting multiple pages under the same, or very similar, rational aren't clear to you, pleases suggest ways they can be improved. :::::For the record, and in case sulfur didn't already say it here: "Identifying something by sight is not original research." This, what I hope is common sense, and the reference policy, pretty much make it clear almost none of this information should be deleted, since most, if not all, of it should be included somewhere, if not where it already is. :::::I also want to point out that I would be fine with room numbers being added to some sort of list article along the lines of the deck articles, or even a real world article about the sets. If someone wants to contribute that level of information, I say let's try and fine a way to present it so it's helpful to anyone who is interested before removing or deleting it, since "we want to cover as much information about ''Star Trek in as great detail as humanly possible''". The same idea applies here. - 11:35, October 10, 2013 (UTC) ::@Capricorn, again, please don't understand my comments here as trying to be "unconstructive" - quite the opposite: you want to find an objective, clear-cut policy for which articles should or should not exist on their own. From being active on this and other wikis for over a decade, I just know that, after a policy has been created and put into place, it will be used for all sorts of good, bad and ugly wiki-lawyering, including using it for purposes that haven't quite been the intention when the policy was first created. As an example for this, look no further than the guidelines you quoted for article length. The spirit of these never was to allow articles that are two sentences long, but instead to prevent articles that are even shorter from being created. That's a difference. With that in mind, I'm not attacking your suggestions out of spite, or because I've got nothing better to do, but because I at least want a policy that is considered a necessity to be as clear-cut and "non-abuseable" as possible (truth is, I would prefer less cumbersome policy to more, but I seem to be in a minority here). So, constructive result of our last back-and-forth is that a new policy would need to make clear that ::*sub-parts of "article-worthy" objects should not get their own article, and that ::*specific kinds of "non-names", like serial numbers or addresses, are not enough to fulfill the "name requirement" ::We would still need to clarify how and why the relation between a starship (or hotel) room and the starship is fundamentally different from a random building and a city, but at least that's getting somewhere. I have a problem with stating that a serial number or similar is definitely not a valid name, because that would pose a problem regarding, for example, the many articles we have for unnamed starships like NCC-1697. Should those be merged into a list article after this policy is put into place? If not, we'll need further clarification about how Room 727 (or any number of other "descriptive titles", mind you) is different from NCC-1697. And that clarification better be in form of a concise definition, not a pile of exceptions. ::This is where we will run into problems, I think, because it looks as if there's already a good number of exceptions that would need to either be dropped, or a good general rule be found instead. ::On the good side, I assume that, when this policy is enacted, we will never again have to go through lengthy discussions about splitting articles, like Talk:Constitution_class_model#Split (and, for better or worse, this would probably pop up again, too), or Talk:Klingon#Split, right? :) -- Cid Highwind (talk) 12:22, October 10, 2013 (UTC) :@Archduk3: Thank you for resolving the deletion discussion. Throwback, this isn't general policy, but if you ever feel a need to defog a situation in such a dramatic way again, and you're unsure how, maybe you ought to just ask a mod first. :@Cid: Your last post is very constructive, thanks for that. I'll adres the points in a moment. But do understand why I found your comments on these two pages to be unconstructive in general: while my proposed policy might be used for wiki-lawyering and thus end up with bad results, it is nothing else then an attempt put limits on the new way of handling information which you invite, and which too I feel may be abused. What bothered me is that you've consistently brought up the problems with regulating that practice, while almost summary dismissing concerns brought up about it happening without any guidelines in place. Since you don't see yourself as unconstructive I'm sure you didn't do that conciously, but it isn't a fair position, especially when the merging of certain small articles is the change rather then the status quo. :Now onto your specific points. The idea that "sub-parts of "article-worthy" objects should not get their own article" is sound, but how do you define that? Starfleet HQ is as much a sub-part of San Francisco as these buildings. An eye is a sub-part of a humanoid, the lunar colonies a sub-part of the moon... That is the biggest problem with what I've suggested as far as I can see it. Though thanks for finaly thinking about it. As for the "specific kinds of "non-names", like serial numbers or addresses, are not enough to fulfill the "name requirement" - I absolutely agree. Though a minor note, I didn't know if you understand this from earlier comments, but building names in the format "number name" aren't just adresses, that's how the buildings are actually named. You'll see those terms on their sides and their websites and I suspect their letterheads. (Then again, the names aren't canon, so according to my proposal in that specific case it's still not a reason to have seperate articles on them) :Concerning the specific article of starships defined by their registry, I could be wrong here, but I always thought that was one of those things where it functioned as a kind of a placeholder article title that had specially been allowed in lieu of a canon name, not that it was accepted as a valid name. I suggested earlier that production sources be accepted as canon names, but maybe in light of that concern it would be better not to. :ps: I've had to write this in a hurry, hope I haven't overlooked something. -- Capricorn (talk) 13:16, October 10, 2013 (UTC) ::@Capricorn, regarding the "sub-part/article-worthy" clause, I was paraphrasing what I assumed to be your suggestion for a definition there. I agree that there are still problems to be solved, basically the same you put up: Room 727 is a part of the article-worthy Hotel Royale just as much as Enterprise-D starboard warp nacelle would be a sub-part of USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-D), or Golden Gate Bridge of San Francisco, or Starbase 47 of Federation starbases. Obviously, we want to write an own article about the "sub-part" in some cases, but not in all. That means that the clause is missing some necessary detail. The length or name requirements, as suggested, don't help much, as there are examples of long/nameable stuff that we wouldn't want articles about just as much as there are examples of the opposite. We could turn the length requirement around and, instead of stating that anything longer than two sentences can have its own article, state that anything below, say, ten sentences can be merged if there is a possible merge target. However, that would only shift, not solve the problem. We could go the route of trying to measure "on-screen importance", which would hopefully lead to correctly merging most of the city-part articles and non-creation of room articles, but might also lead to merging of the whale articles (because, let's face it, they weren't important to the story) and incorrect creation of other articles (hey, Worf's spine was an important detail in one TNG episode ;)). I still say that, whatever strict rule we find for this, there will always be examples where that strict rule will lead to a bad result. So, I still advocate leaving at least some wiggle room by, first and foremost, not trying to define the exact line between "mergeable" and "non-mergeable" articles but instead by stating examples for cases that are clearly one or the other, and also by calling the end result of this a guideline instead of a policy. -- Cid Highwind (talk) 14:04, October 10, 2013 (UTC) :::::Regarding the recent rename of this, and the general "goal" of this page for that matter, I don't think we should be trying to create a policy/guideline for "merging" things, since we already have one, but rather we should be thinking about what information would be best presented as a "list article" (see Earth spacedocks for example). By only identifying what we want our list articles to be, instead of what can or can't be merged, we should be able to avoid most of the problems already mentioned. - 21:30, October 10, 2013 (UTC)